Florida liberal arts college reinstates ‘wokeness’ course amid furore

New College of Florida reinstated a course on “wokeness” taught by controversial British media personality and culture warrior Andrew Doyle to its catalog, after appearing to remove it from an earlier version, amid an ongoing furore over the university’s transformation into a more conservative institution.

The course was also restored to an internal enrollment system but without Doyle’s name attached, according to students with access to the system. The moves followed criticism of the course online and local media reports on Tuesday night.

Developments at New College are closely followed as America’s elite educational institutions have become a favored target of Donald Trump and his allies, especially Vice-President-elect JD Vance. The rightwing takeover of New College, and its subsequent transformation, has been touted as a model for other US universities, especially as Trump returns to the White House.

The course, “the ‘woke’ movement”, is set to be taught by British “anti-woke” media commentator Doyle, who rose to prominence by running a parody Twitter account that satirized social justice activists and who presents a show on the UK’s rightwing GB News. In its synopsis the course presented “wokeness” as “a kind of cult” whose “disciples … have insinuated themselves into all of our major institutions”.

Doyle’s course, first reported on by the Tampa Bay Times, indicates the impact of ideological hires on education at the once liberal college, which has been subject to rightwing takeover under the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, and hand-picked conservative college board members including rightwing activist Christopher Rufo.

The Guardian was provided with three copies of the prospectus advertising independent study projects (ISPs) for New College of Florida students.

In a telephone conversation, fourth-year student Sara Engels said the handbook issued by the college on 9 November included the “‘woke’ movement” course. On Tuesday, a new prospectus omitted the course, as did another issued after 9am on Wednesday. At 10am on Wednesday, however, the course had been reinstated.

She said that the course was not visible in internal enrollment systems when she checked around 11am. By 1pm it had been added to the system, but Doyle’s name was not associated with it.

New College of Florida spokesperson Nathan March said: “There has been some confusion in versions of the ISP Guide that were shared… The Provost’s Office regrets the confusion of having different versions having gone out.

“The status of the ISP has never officially changed during the last several days”, March continued, acknowledging “inconsistent screenshots of our course listings online” which show “the instructor as TBA”.

March concluded that “the course is indeed still scheduled and will be taught by Dr Doyle”.

The catalog entry in Wednesday’s revised prospectus introduces what it calls “the ‘woke’ movement” as being “best understood as a kind of cult”. The entry claims that its “members are generally decent people with good intentions, but their methods are essentially illiberal”.

The catalog entry does not name any membership organization that supporters could be members of. The Guardian’s search of IRS nonprofit records indicate that while there are some 20 nonprofits with the word “woke” in their names, none have reported any income in their most recent filings, and most appear to be inactive.

The prospectus does not identify any figures who describe themselves as members of the supposed movement. But it does come with a reading list that includes Judith Butler, a UC Berkeley philosopher who has written influential work on feminism and gender, and Ibram X Kendi, an author and professor who runs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.

The reading list includes two of Doyle’s own books: 2021’s Free Speech and Why it Matters and 2022’s The New Puritans.

In The New Puritans, Doyle characterizes Butler as one of the authors of the “foundational sacred texts” of “the woke religion”, a movement which he claims has effected the “legitimisation of bullying on a grand scale”.

Also on the reading list is America’s Cultural Revolution by Rufo.

In that book – which is “built on a foundation of exaggerations and misrepresentations” according to Vox – Rufo claimed that Kendi’s proposals for antiracist government policies would bring about “an end to the constitutional order”.

In an April 2023 newsletter, Rufo wrote that “serial fabrication is part and parcel of Butler’s ideology”. For her part, in Who’s Afraid of Gender, Butler accused Rufo of “stoking the anti-academic passions of rightwing movements” with “incendiary phantasms”.

The reading list also includes books by former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, and linguist John McWhorter, whose 2021 book Woke Racism claimed that “I do not mean that these people’s ideology is ‘like’ a religion … I mean that it actually is a religion”.

Engels, the fourth-year student, said that “students aren’t happy” about what she called a “very slanted” course.

“We were told that the new administration wanted to balance perspectives”, she added, “but there hasn’t been balance”.

She pointed to the departures of staff and students from the college as signs that “many people feel uncomfortable” with the new administration’s actions, “and I think that’s by design.

“It’s not a healthy learning environment”, Engels said.

Doyle is a British writer, satirist and media personality who has become one of the UK’s most prominent “anti-woke” critics.

He has claimed to be on the political left, and supported Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn in the 2017 election. But he came to prominence as a political commentator by courting rightwing opinion, including with a social media persona, Titania McGrath, which he used to satirize “woke” politics; columns in the “hard-right” populist magazine Spiked; and a GB News show called Free Speech Nation.

GB News is a British conservative media outlet owned by Christian hedge fund boss Sir Paul Marshall, has been repeatedly sanctioned by British broadcast regulator Ofcom, which last month fined the station £100,000 for breaking impartiality rules in the lead-up to the UK’s 2024 elections.

As his profile as an anti-woke crusader has grown, Doyle has won invitations from top-tier rightwing influencers. On Jordan Peterson’s Daily Wire podcast, Doyle in 2023 characterized “social justice” as a “religious movement”, and in 2021 described Britain’s hate crime laws as an attack on free speech. In 2022 he appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program to talk about “woke culture”.

Doyle is employed by the university as a presidential scholar, a new initiative from the administration of Richard Corcoran. Other presidential scholars include Portland State University professor Bruce Gilley, who in 2017 published a paper entitled The Case for Colonialism in Third World Quarterly, which touched off a firestorm of controversy by arguing that western colonialism was largely beneficial for colonised nations.

The Guardian contacted Doyle for comment on the developing controversy about his course but received no response.

The Guardian has previously reported on a rash of rightwing hires at NCF, and their invitation to an extremist writer Steve Sailer to partake in a debate on race and crime.